Introduction

As a system administrator, it is important to understand how to run tasks. A task is simply a program, application, command, or script that does something useful. In the Windows environment, you need to know how to run tasks with alternate credentials, so you aren't always logged on to your workstation with administrator credentials. You need to know how to run tasks against remote servers or workstations, which enables you to do daily administration tasks without ever leaving the comfort (and security) of your workstation. Often it can be beneficial to have tasks run as soon as someone logs into a system and there are several ways you can set this up. Finally, if you are trying to automate certain tasks (as all good system administrators should), you'll need to schedule tasks to run at certain times of the day or night. I cover all of this and more in this chapter.